this right here is one of my favorite movie moments the rumbling gutful Roar
of the ball run it's
incredible wait on a
soundbar oh movie Magic exposed Nakamichi sales pitch here is absolutely
wild I mean One does not simply position a soundbar against a multi-channel audio
system that costs tens of thousands of dollars and yet they did so okay now
kamichi if that is your real name I'll bite I'm going to rip my SVS home
theater apart I'm going to replace it with your Soundbar and I'm going to see
if maybe I could have saved myself thousands of dollars and a heck of a lot
of hassle I'm also going to see if I can tell you about our sponsor ug green
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description I like tinkering so I went the discreet route for my home theater I
got some SVS Ultra towers and surrounds in ceilings courtesy of clips and a pair
of SVS Subs all wired through my walls
to a den AV receiver these components
together cost an eyeing 13,6
$600 not including the price of install which Probably sounds completely Bonkers
to the average consumer who's buying $200 Bose soundbar like that one that we
covered last year but if you spent any time on the home theater subreddit
you'll know that somehow we're still in bang for the buck territory which is
what makes Nakamichi claims so unbelievable I mean who do they think
they are no really though old school
audio nerds are going to remember Nakamichi history making cassette and CD
players with the dragon name indicating their top-of-the-line products but that
company failed to transition from analog to digital and in 1998 they were
purchased by a Chinese holding company Grand Holdings 4 years later they filed
for bankruptcy in the 2000s their shambling corpse was reanimated to sell
iPod docs and portable DVD players with only modest success and more recently
the company has returned to the high-end audio scene to FOC us
on Sound Bars let's see if they should
have stayed buried the first thing you're going to notice about the dragon
when you get it is that it is huge and really heavy to get a sense of the scale
here's that bestselling Bose sound bar off of Amazon and here is the Sonos Arc it
completely dwarfs them both now obviously these comparisons aren't
entirely Fair because the dragon justifies its massive size by packing in
a spping 17 distinct drivers including
four that reflect off the ceiling to give you a sense of height and these
Nifty air motion Transformer tweeters that work like an accordion squeezing in
and out to produce mid to high-end frequencies with extra Clarity
supposedly but I think we've gotten ahead of ourselves a little bit let's
look at the rest of the package quad subwoofers you say I mean there are dual
8in drivers in each of these two subwoofers but my speakers have multiple
drivers in them and I don't call them three speakers this won't be the last
time we see Nakamichi stretching the truth we'll come back to that but first
there's the surround speakers which each feature four board drivers on the sides
and an angled upward firing driver that can be rotated toward your listening
position to improve overhead audio effects these bring the total number of
drivers to a whopping 31 with a circuit blowing Peak power of 3,000 wats
thankfully you'll never actually need that much power at once because at even
50% of maximum volume we are well into
uncomfortably loud territory which means we should be able to get theater-like
performance out of this package then right well what are we waiting for let's
give it a shot good
Clarity the mids feel a little empty to me it's pretty big sound from a soundbar
though yeah and I think having the nice big surrounds is great sometimes you'll
get systems where you have these small surrounds and they sound ply whenever
you have surrounding but these are big enough that you still get a similar
sound all the way around you good volume of sound
surround is okay yeah it's not as good as the HTA
9's it's not as good as a like dedicated
5.1 yeah that's beside me that ain't behind me the subs sound pretty good I
will say that the subs are great I think that the bass is like Punchy and um it's
quite musical but the issue is that it just doesn't get that low let's pull up
baby driver and you will see exactly what we're talking about
like did you hear that just now on the Baseline that walking downwards it gets
a little boomy at the top because it's trying to compensate for the dip where
the crossover lies every criticism I have of it though
has to be tempered by the fact that realistically in my mind what I'm
comparing it to is a system that costs several times as much if I was comparing
to something else I wouldn't be sitting here going yes but the dip quite for me
I remember when we when when I was testing this earlier I had listened to
your home theater first and then I listened to the dragon and then I went
oh but then I came back 3 days later
after the weekend listened to the dragon first and I was like this is awesome
switching over to my quote unquote spoiled
speakers you just hear there's like when when when there is that base punch is
just like like you actually feel it Y
which you don't get from the Nakamichi which is really disappoint considering
they are big subwoofers still I mean at
half the volume of the ones that are here though and you know what yeah it
sounds more natural it's a better
balanced experience but at what cost yeah and I
was going to say in terms of the treble performance the Nichi is kind of awesome
yeah I don't really miss it like listening to just the music I was like it still sounds really really good
coming back to the bass though part of the reason that it doesn't punch the way
that the SVS Subs do is that while Nakamichi advertises performance down to
20 HZ what we found was uh actually
closer to what 30 to 45 before it just
rolls off completely yeah it's um it's really disappointing and I think it's
fine to have base that only goes that low but be honest be honest about it if
you guys want to experience these two systems side by side by the way we're
going to have a Boral recording that we created in collaboration with bla from
headphones.com and we're going to have those in unlisted links in the video
description it's pretty darn good in
terms of spatial performance but I've definitely encountered better we've
spent a lot of time comparing the Nakamichi Dragon to a full-fledged
system I mean they invite that comparison but let's try doing something
that's a competitor of the same form factor like the Sonos Arc yeah I like
the arc so I'll be interested to see how it holds up but I just want to take this
moment to acknowledge how good the IO is
on the Nakamichi The sonus Arc gives you one HDMI so you better have EC Nakamichi
doesn't have any Wi-Fi but it does have
a bajillion inputs and outputs and it does still support Bluetooth and what's
nice is that having no microphone while it does mean that the calibration is
more manual and tedious means that there's no support for voice assistance
which some people might see as a downer but some people might actually consider
to be a plus yeah now let's listen to what the arc can do
Sonos is unironically a good little soundar it's a it's a good little
soundar the nakami dragon does sound
better better it's worth noting I don't have a pair of Sono speakers to throw in
the back but even the sound signature is
smaller I will say that the Sonos sub is
admirable it's surprisingly good for its size is it it's uh they knocked it out
of the park with that and something we've got to consider in all of this is any sound bar is only going to be as
good as the limited options that you have available to expand it sure you can
add surrounds to your Sonos as long as you're willing to overpay for them and
find a way to mount them on your own speaking of flexibility where are you
going to put the Nakamichi Dragon stuff it doesn't come with mounting hardware
these stands that we got while nice are 300 bucks that's kind of a bummer yeah
so like any solution then it has its advantages and disadvantages but I think
it boils down to this the dragon provides I'd say about 80% of the
experience that my AV setup provides at a quarter of the price that is a massive
value but and you probably know this if
you've ever bought something like a graphics card the issue is that it's
easy to look good when you compare against something much more expensive
because the farther up the product stack you go the worse value you tend to get
so if we were to compare the dragon then against something that costs a little
less than half the price like a Samsung q990 C that has many of the same
features but is more modest in size and has just a single subwoofer well you
could make a pretty similar argument there that you're getting a lot of the
performance of the Nakamichi and regardless of your budget
there are strong arguments to be made still for going the DIY route personally
and I'm sure I'm going to ruffle some feathers here I don't find that the
height channels really add that much for me so for two grand or even four grand I
might go with a mean 5.1 surround setup
and an AV receiver that is going to give me better quality sound right out of the
gate and that I can sell and buy and
upgrade over time to turn it into something truly exceptional like the
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link in the video description if you guys enjoyed this video hey I did too I
love checking out stuff like this bold bombastic claims are so much fun to
investigate whether they fall well short or fall even just a little bit short
like today if you guys enjoyed this video maybe go check out the ones about
my home theater set up we've apparently got a playlist of them